America's minstrel has created some great songs. Here are bass lines to 12.

VICTOR WOOTEN: LEARN MUSIC JUST LIKE LANGUAGE

"Although many musicians agree music is a language, it is rarely treated as such."

In a deeply impressive TED ED video five-time GRAMMY® winner Victor Wooten uses his own astonishing bass playing to highlight his view that music should be learned the same way a child absorbs language: by using it, every day, in close contact with "experts," and making lots of mistakes.

"Learning to speak was not something you were sent somewhere to do only a few times a week."

Playing the bass is a lot like playing sports. You develop specialized skills, you can
succeed or fail on any given day, and you need to warm up before you play. For musicians,
warming up has three components: body, mind, and technique.

First, you’ve got to be warmed up physically to play at your best. Your body needs to
feel comfortable and up to the physical challenge of playing bass. Stretch out a little. Jump up and down a few times to get the blood pumping. If you’re cold, soak your hands in warm water and put on a sweater. This entire process can be done in about a minute.
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SECRET 28:
BEGIN WITH THE BASICS

Mastering the Skills that Matter Most

Let’s say you’ve been driving for many years. Even with all that experience and time behind the wheel, you still couldn’t compete in the Indianapolis 500. Professional drivers
have mastered a set of specific, insider skills that you don’t know.

The same is true with music. What makes great bassists great is their focus on specific,
technical skills that let them control tone, rhythm, dynamics, time, and the feel. The insiders in the music world know that real virtuosity comes from mastering these Basics of Music. It’s not about how many notes you can play per second.

You may want to skip the Basics when you play bass, concentrating instead only on the
fun stuff, like learning a new song or playing something you already know. Here’s the
problem with that approach: You need the Basics to learn new material in the first place!
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